My life as a mom with 5 young children is beautifully imperfect

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In-Home Garage Sale

I had a garage sale this weekend. In my room. With my 5 children. You know that pile of stuff I had ‘picked up’ for them over the past month? Well, I told them they could buy back anything they wanted. One dollar per item. They made some interesting picks, especially the smalls. I wouldn’t have saved it, but that’s their business. Of course they could only buy as much as they had money for – which made the picking all that more difficult. But I think it turned out the way it should have in the end.

As you can imagine there was still a lot of stuff left over after the picking was done. So I shifted and sorted and this is what I came up with:

I had 1 tub of garbage. This was all the things that had no business in my home or anyone else’s. Torn clothes, broken toys, doodled on papers, worthless stuff – it was trash, rubbish, waste.

Then I had a second tub of items to donate. Nicer clothes that my kids won’t wear, toys that they obviously don’t care about (and neither do I). And – BONUS – the donation truck came yesterday – excellent timing.

The third tub was a spur of the moment decision on my part. There were things that the kids didn’t care about, but I did. And I could not bring myself to throw them away or donate them because I had paid good money for them and we might need them again. Or better yet, they might ask for them. Oh, then what would I do? I would feel compelled to buy it for them AGAIN. Things like: Hats for costumes, Hawaiian lays for a luau, a game, and a bucket of legos. I have no idea why the Legos weren’t important to someone. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, when you have soooo much of something what’s one more bucket full? And they’re right, who would care? This bin, I will put away in a storage closet for now.

The forth contained clothing items that don’t fit anyone right now, so I will keep them for hand-me-downs later. Fair enough!

I’m thankful to have my room back! It looks so nice and clean.

But this whole process was harder than I thought it would be. It was really hard to get rid of stuff I had paid money for. I felt guilty for having so much extra. I felt guilty for buying it. I felt guilty for not teaching my children to take better care of their things.

In the end I realized I needed to no only purge our home of the excess, but more importantly I need to make a shift in my thinking and my habits.

This will be the hardest part because this way of thinking is pervasive in our culture. Everyone is doing it. We are almost wired this way. Work so we can get the next thing. Things will make us happy. Having an organized, perfect home will make us happy and peaceful.

But it isn’t working for me. It doesn’t bring me peace and rest. I’m more frustrated and frazzled because of all the stuff and even when I organize it to death, it’s still a time consuming job to keep it that way.

To change my habits and way of thinking would be a massive shift. And I’m not even sure what exactly that means right now.

So, for now, I will continue to rid my home of the excess and ponder ways to keep the “stuff” from coming into our home in the first place. Some of this may be my purchasing habits, and some is not.